Elliot Mintz (born February 16, 1945) is an American media consultant and publicist. In the 1960s and early 1970s Mintz was an underground radio DJ and host. In the 1970s he became a spokesperson for John Lennon and Yoko Ono, and took on other musicians and actors as clients as a publicist. He later became the publicist for Paris Hilton.

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Mintz was born in the Bronx borough of New York City on February 16, 1945. In 1963 he moved to California to attend Los Angeles City College, partially inspired by the film The Misfits,[1] where he studied broadcasting and began to do radio interviews. Early interviews by Mintz included Jayne Mansfield and Jack Lemmon. His career was launched after the death of John F. Kennedy, when he discovered a classmate of his had known Lee Harvey Oswald while in the US Marines together. The interview was the first character and background interview done about Oswald in the US, and was picked up by the national and international radio broadcast networks. The New York Times wrote about Mintz that he soon became "a well-known ... underground radio D.J. in the 1960s".[2][3][4]

Mintz said of his time at City College that, "I studied everything having to do with broadcasting. I wanted to know how to broadcast. I wanted to learn how to do the weather, how to operate a camera, how to be an engineer, how to do news, how to do everything having to do with broadcast, to work on losing the New York accent, to work on losing the stutter and I gravitated to a particular area in broadcasting which was interviewing. I found myself all-consumed with the study of how to conduct a meaningful interview."[1]

From 1966 to 1968,[4] Elliot Mintz had two shows on KPFK in Los Angeles, California, Looking In and Looking Out.[5] The shows provided a platform for community conversation as well as for interviews Mintz would do with public figures. Each show would begin with a series of rhetorical questions, which listeners could call in to respond to.[6] When he started with KPFK, Mintz was the youngest talkshow host in the US, at the age of 21, broadcasting a nightly radio show on the station.[1] In 1971 he hosted a Kaiser Broadcasting syndicated television show called Headshop that integrated musical guests with film clips shot in and around Southern California.[3][7]

Mintz was the host of the television interview show Head Shop, where he interviewed individuals including Kris Kristofferson.[14] He officially retired in 2014, upon which he released the website ElliotMintz.com, where a few hundred of his interviews with celebrities and public figures were made available. Other radio stations he worked for include KPPC, KABC, Earth News Radio, Innerview and Westwood One.[12]

Mintz's longest client relationship has been with the late John Lennon and Yoko Ono.[2] Though he was a friend and not employee of the couple, since the death of Lennon, Mintz has acted as a spokesperson for the Lennon estate. While sifting through Lennon's belongings, he discovered hundreds of unreleased tape recordings including half-finished new songs, early versions of famous hits, and idle thoughts. Beginning in 1988, he hosted a weekly syndicated radio series based upon these recordings called The Lost Lennon Tapes, was broadcast for about four years. After the show came to an end, Mintz began hosting the spinoff radio program The Beatle Years. According to the Los Angeles Times, the show was heard on over 100 American radio stations and in seven countries by an estimated weekly audience of about seven million.[8]